The griga’ath paid no attention to me. It moved past me, still wearing the face and form—and even the smell, like an old boat in the sun—of someone I loved. Fire was just beginning to leak through the body now, twinkling coyly between the ribs and under the arms. Griga’aths blaze without burning, eternally; in time they become exactly like stars cloaked in human skin, shattering and swallowing what they come near. It halted a step before the darkness, turning my friend’s body this way and that: strangely uncertain, even looking back once. I hid my face from it, like the others.
Someone was pounding furiously on the real door of the real room. As though the noise had suddenly tipped the balance, the griga’ath took a single stride forward and passed from this world. I could still see it for what seemed a very long time, glowing steadily brighter as it grew smaller, spinning slowly away down the black archway that runs between what we know and what we cannot bear to know. I think I cried after it; if I did, the sound was lost when the door gave way and Karsh lunged into the room. Tikat was just behind him.
THE INNKEEPER
I suppose I should give thanks that the bottles hit the Kinariki wagoner and not me when they toppled from the taproom shelves. The Kinariki was paying his score at the time: his hand pulled across mine— courteously leaving his change behind—as he widened his eyes and sank to the floor without a sound. Do the gods expect my gratitude for that? Very well. I give thanks.
And that is all the gods get from me for the rest of my life, and you may tell them so if you’re much in the habit of chatting them up. Between one minute and the next, The Gaff and Slasher, my home for thirty years, came crashing to ruination around me, as I knew would happen the day I let those three women cross my threshold. The bottles were followed by every mug and wine glass I owned, and then by the hanging lamps. I thought javak at first, though we haven’t had one of those corkscrew storms since Rosseth was small. But when the two windows blew out—not in, out—as though they’d never been there, and the shelves behind the bar started pulling loose with a long squeal of old nails in old planks, I knew that this was no javak. The beer pumps were groaning and bucking under my hand, trying to plunge free of their sockets; the few rusty tag-ends of armor I had anchored to the walls to keep people from stealing them shot across the room like crossbow bolts. A hide-factor from Devarati got hit that time, but I think he recovered.
Earthquake? Earthquake? There wasn’t so much as a twitch out of that floor—my customers, the conscious ones, were down flat, clinging to it with their fingernails, like lizards to a wall, while benches and broken glass and overturned tables hurtled past them. Within thirty seconds, I was the one object still standing in the taproom, supported by nothing but outrage. For I never doubted the source of this catastrophe for one instant. Storms and volcanoes and family spats of the gods be damned—the cause, the bloody cause, was only a few bloody inches above my head, and I was already on my way up there even though I may not have seemed to be moving at all. I was just waiting for my feet to catch up with my fury.
Tikat staggered through the outside door just then, crouching low to stay on his own feet. When I came out from behind the bar to meet him, I felt like a very small boat pushing off from shore into a howling rapids. Tikat was yapping something at me and pointing upwards. I couldn’t hear him in the confusion, but I knew he must be asking about his mad white Lukassa. I shook my head and shouted back, “Where’s the boy? Have you seen the damned boy?”
He never bothered to answer, but only reeled on by me, treading on customers and armor bits alike, slipping in the puddles of mingled ale and wine, heading for the stair. I scrambled after him, pushing him out of the way well before we reached the landing. No one was going to break down that door but me.
TIKAT
Down in the taproom it was bad enough. Even with the windows gone, the pressure around me was so great that it was like being under water when I dived and dived for Lukassa. I found myself holding my breath for fear of drowning, and pushing the air away with my spread arms as I struggled forward. But on the stair there was a hot, stinking wind blowing straight down, battering Karsh and me from wall to railing while the steps themselves flew apart under our feet. We seemed to be making no headway at all: now we were birds beating against a storm, flying slowly backward, counting it progress to lose only a little ground. How long this went on, I cannot tell you.
I think today—I say I think—that I might well have given up then, but for Karsh. Not that he spared me even a glance after he thrust me aside, let alone any encouragement; indeed, he missed his footing once and lurched full into me, and would have had the two of us bouncing all the way down those splintering steps if I had not been able to catch hold of him and brace myself in time. But he never lost heart or looked back, that fat, roaring man. He bent his fleshy neck and bowed his shoulders, and lumbered ahead, heaving and cursing, hacking out a way through the wind. I followed, gratefully riding his wake, unable to imagine what could be driving him on so savagely. Because it was Karsh, you see. If it had been anyone else, surely I would have understood, but it was Karsh.
On the landing he paused for a moment, shaking himself heavily, and I saw his face, huge with that pale rage that takes him over when nothing is going as he would have it. The blue eyes were darkening as I watched, turning almost lavender; his teeth were set savagely in his lower lip, which was bleeding. Then he was off again, charging along a corridor choked with falling plaster and roiling dust and shrieking half-clad guests trampling each other to reach the stairs. I was knocked down myself, almost immediately, but managed to roll aside and get to my feet by climbing up and over someone in a purple night-robe. The hallway was booming and rippling, like the metal sheets those actors used to use for thunder. I stumbled along, arms across my face, toward the tafiya’s room.
Karsh was already there, hammering on the door, rattling the knob, pounding again, then beginning to heave his whole body against it: one slow, muffled thump after another. For once there was no breath in him for bellowing—I could hear it wheeze out each time he smashed himself into the thick old wood. I was not quite up with him when the door finally burst open and we fell through.
At the far end of the room there was nothing. There was an emptiness. No, listen, don’t interrupt, listen to me. The emptiness was a mouth: you could see its edges writhing and folding like lips, beginning to close, and the foul wind seethed between them. Far away, or far in, or far down, a bright, bright spark tumbling forever, blazing bravely in the void. I knew what it was.
Lukassa was standing with her back to me, near the empty bed. There were others in the room, but I only saw her. She did not turn at the noise when Karsh and I broke in, but began to walk toward that black mouth that was closing more quickly now. Her steps were as light as they had always been when she came to meet me, never quite running, but running in her heart and her eyes. She was gone into the emptiness before I could call; and before I could reach it myself, it had snapped shut and vanished, leaving nothing behind but a sagging, crumbling wall in a little wrecked room full of the sound of her name.
LUKASSA
I am not Lukassa. I am no one. No one can pass the gates of death twice. I am no one. I walked through, and they waited for me. They do not want to wait, but I will make them.
Cold, cold, cold, like the river. Someone was calling, is calling me, far behind on the edge of Lukassa. But I was not Lukassa then. I am a drawing that has been scratched out, scrawled over, erased again. Far ahead, a star, singing, promising to tell me my name if I can catch it in time. Is that why I am here, was here? I should hurry. Did I hurry?
Death is a nowhere lined with lightning. I remember. There is cold nowhere under my feet, but I walked swiftly, because I remember the way. There are faces now, there were faces before, flowing by in the dark, between me and the star. When I die the first time, I will see those same faces.
Down here in the riverbed, it is quiet as quiet. Above me, on the surface, the water snarls and tears, as it will tear me when I fall to its jaws. But in the riverbed, I looked up through stillness and watch the faces flowing past, so many heavy, weary village faces that should not smile at me with such tender knowledge. They should not do that. I am no one.
Beyond them, my star. I brush the faces away and climb over the water, over the beanfields and thatched roofs, and I follow the singing of the star. If I walk without tiring, without thinking, without expectation, so very gradually the star draws nearer. I remember.
This is different. Why is this different? Death is death, but something is different, the darkness. I can see great yellow claws smashing through from the other side, ripping down and down, and a greenish glow beyond. The claws withdraw, strike again, they leave simmering weals across the darkness, like the ones on his back when his uncle will beat him for stealing fruit. Beat whom? The faces begin to snap their jaws as they hiss by. There were so many, sometimes they hide the star.
Why must I still hear him? It is noisy here, not like the riverbed, with the faces coming at me like lances now, with the thing on the other side of the dark chuckling to itself as it strikes and strikes, and the darkness growling in pain, louder each time the yellow claws slash down. And even so I heard him calling from far away, farther away than anything, calling that name he will call me. That name that is not, was never, mine, me.
I must listen to the star, nothing else. The star had a woman’s voice, a low voice, city-rough, with a foreign lilt. I lose the star often, because the darkness is thrashing and convulsing all around me, but I could always hear it singing, clear as morning wind. One day I will catch up with it, if it keeps singing, and then it will tell me my name.
This time it was very different, being dead. This time death is seething, bustling with so much movement and color and earthly to-do. It might almost be another marketplace, except for who was tending the stalls, and what might be for sale there. There will not be words or thoughts for such beings, such things, but that makes no matter, because they were not real. The riverbed is real.
As I pass they will come after me, those beasts of fire and filth who jabber and coo and tear at my shadow, because they have none themselves. No matter. This death is all shadow; this death was like the hand pictures that someone used to make for whom? Thin twisting fingers sending smoky monsters stalking across what smudgy plaster wall with the long crack near the broom closet? This death is a false, shabby country, peeling back, peeling away, layer on layer, under the yellow claws. And even the thing outside is nothing but loud shadow when I will face it at last in the rubble of the darkness. The claws are soft and puckered like gone-bad vegetables, the blood-wet chuckle a senile cough. No matter, pass on.
Is the star nothing but shadow, too? With the darkness raked to shreds, a low, thick sky remained, the color of the claws. The star seems larger, nearer, moving sluggishly, fighting against the stickiness of the sky. It was a man, the star, not a woman. He burns so brightly, no wonder that I will see him clearly from so far away, singing and demanding. What must I do when I reach him? I could not remember, but I know.
Something is here. Something is here that is not shadow. Behind all the foolish racket and show, there was a waiting, a something that quickly drops its puppets and slips away when I come near. Did I ever find it? It wanted the star, it is moving toward the star, like me. Real as the riverbed, it sidles toward the star.
“Show yourself,” I said, but it will not. I say, “Show yourself, why be afraid? This is your play, not mine.” But it lets me just so close, shuffling through the crackly wrack of lath and plaster universes, before I can feel it slinking off after the star again. This made me angry, because although it never caught the star, it will drive it forever out of my reach. I have forever, but the star does not. How can I know that?
The riverbed will be a better place than here. Worlds underfoot like children’s toys, and nothing true in any one of them except the star and me, and that sly, sliding other just ahead of me. And he still calls so loudly, constantly braying that name that I am not across endless counterfeit heavens and hells. Ashy creatures made of dead wet leaves roused at the noise; gold and scarlet butterflies with long thin fish-teeth will swirl and snuffle around my face; things like shambling hillsides move in silently behind me. Things like men and women made all of twilight come twining about me and dancing on, looking back and weeping when I will not follow. Smothering tides of stagnant fog hide them then, barring my way. But the star summons me, and I pass on.
Pass on to what? and where? and has all this already been? The star drifts backward toward me so slowly, and that other prowls sideways off to the side, unseen, breathing. Suddenly there will be no faces, no more carnival ogres, no more painted scenery: every color but absence has run away like rain, leaving a little waxen starlight over a ribbon of nowhere, and me between. In this last emptiness, three small sounds: the angry singing ahead, the calling so far behind, and the soft rough breath matching my pace. A thousand years, ten thousand, ten thousand thousand.
How can he keep calling so; how can I hear him? I lay back down in the riverbed, just for a moment, to see the other faces again, but they were gone, too. Even so, it will be hard for me to rise and walk on after the star, although I cannot grow tired. I think I wish I could be tired, could be hot or cold or angry or afraid. How good to be afraid. But I had something to do, and only the star can tell me what it is. Why did he keep calling that name?
Was I singing? Have I been the one singing, all these centuries, trudging behind my own song?
“Some say yes,
and some say no,
and that is how it was meant to go.
Some say no,
and some say yes,
and that’s the way the gods do bless.
Some have more, and some have less,
